In 2010 and going forward, we start a new decade. It’s time to shake things up a little, so here’s a list of web design trends which got overused in the first decade of the 2000s, and so have become tired and cliched:

• Grunge – Splattered, sloppy, gritty, urban, and looking dirty. Grunge looked great for about six months because nobody else was doing it. Now that we’re drowning in the stuff, we would like to see our last paint splatter sometime in the immediate future.
• The wet floor effect – Where you have text “standing” on a reflective surface, so the mirror image of the text is seen faintly below. It looked impressive the first ten times we’d seen it, but now it’s “meh.”
• Computer stuff – Your business is on the web or about technology, so why not use photos of mice and keyboards in the header? Gee, I don’t know, how about “Because it shows you have all the imagination of a stone?”
• Cute vector mascots – Yes, those adorable, spunky beavers and chirpy birds gives your business a cuddly personality. Once in a while, they’re original and refreshing. But nobody is fooled. You’re in business to make money, no matter how many chunky, freckled kids with glasses you have in the upper left corner.
• THE GIANT RSS ICON – Alright! We get it! You want people to notice that you have an RSS feed. But it’s about time we all learned that there are people who know how to use RSS and there are people who do not. You will not reach that latter audience even if your RSS icon jumps out of the screen, blows up to the size of a house, and slams them on the head yelling “I have an RSS feed!”

Peter Brittain

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